With the PS3, Sony has let its video entertainment aspirations dictate the …

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In May of last year I wrote a rather long editorial on Sony's decision to go with Blu-ray, wherein I demonstrated that no matter how you slice it, Sony's decision to go with Blu-ray made the console considerably more expensive than it would have been otherwise. I suggested that Sony should have abandoned Blu-ray or, at most, should have made it an add-on, such as the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360. The reason is simple: by pushing the console's price into sky-high territory, Sony was stretching themselves dangerously thin.

Almost a year later, it's completely obvious that Sony has stretched itself too thin. As we learned this morning, Sony is now bifurcating their product line even further, delivering a lesser product to the European market in order to save a few bucks. Dumping some of the dedicated hardware for backwards compatibility should save Sony a few greenbacks (or yen, as the case may be), but it screws gamers. And for what? How much cost is Sony saving by scratching this hardware?

There have been several "tear down" estimates for PS3, the best of which comes from iSuppli. They estimate the cost of the Emotion Engine in the PS3 at $27. That's the chief hardware component providing PS2 backwards compatibility. Did Sony just jack with the PS3 over $27? Even if the cost were twice as much, would it be worth it?

With the PS3, Sony has let its video entertainment aspirations dictate the design of a gaming console, and the results are now plain for us to see: when the going gets rough, the gaming functionality gets going (going, gone!) out of the box. Buh-bye. Sure, now Sony will use software to provide some backwards compatibility, but not full compatibility. They've got a stop-gap measure in place, and we're hoping that it works really well because who wants to keep an old PS2 sitting around once you have a PS3?

How many other ways has Sony shown ill-placed deference to their media aspirations? They did add HDMI to the low-end unit a few months before launch, which is great news for non-gaming uses such as watching Blu-ray movies in 1080p. It also increased the price on the low-end unit, of course. Then there's the HD scaler: hard-locked resolutions are more media-oriented than the more gamer-friendly variable resolutions.

If Sony thought of the PS3 as a gaming machine first and foremost, they would have never let this happen. When their vision for the PS3 became one of pushing Blu-ray rather than delivering the top-notch gaming experience they're known for, they went astray. Removing more gaming functionality isn't going to set them on the right path.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher